Dearborn Public Schools
School districts in Wayne County have placed a proposal on the November 8th ballot to provide added funding for our schools. It is the “Regional Enhancement Millage Proposal.”
If approved by the entire county, the 2 mil proposal will generate approximately $6.2 million from Dearborn but the District will receive $7.8 million in additional funding for our schools. Money would go to local schools starting this year and the millage expires after six years.
School districts in Wayne County have placed a proposal on the November 8th ballot to provide added funding for our schools. It is the “Regional Enhancement Millage Proposal.”
If approved by the entire county, the 2 mil proposal will generate approximately $6.2 million from Dearborn but the District will receive $7.8 million in additional funding for our schools. Money would go to local schools starting this year and the millage expires after six years.
Dear Parents,
If you are an AOL email user, please be aware that you may not receive email notifications due to AOL policies. We are working to resolve this issue with AOL.
Thank you for your patience while we work with AOL to make sure you get classroom notifications from your teacher.
Sincerely,
Technology Department
There is a new Phishing attempt (attempts to steal your password) going around. Please be aware of this and DO NOT click on the link and enter your password. It looks like this:
You have 1 new Message from GOOGLE USER
[Message clipped] View entire message
The hyperlink takes you to a google log on page.
Again, this is an attempt to steal your credentials. Do not enter anything in the link.
One way to protect yourself from this is to turn on 2-step authentication. 2-step authentication means that you’ll receive a text message whenever your credentials are entered on a new device (or every 30 days).
Be safe.
2 Step Authentication in Google is a way to increase the security of your data. Basically, 2 step authentication means that you have to provide your password and something else. Normally, that is a code from a device that you have (usually your phone). A code is sent to your phone each time that you log into a new computer. Google has just made a change so that instead of entering a code, you can now just confirm that new computer using your phone.
This makes using 2 step authentication even easier. 2 step authentication makes it much harder for hackers to access your data.
Here is an opportunity for all staff members to purchase devices for personal use. Please note that this is being offered for personal use and not for use in the school buildings. We don’t directly support any of these, we are just making the information available to you. Some of the deals are pretty dog gone good.
Several of the awarded vendors on the 2016 TRIG Device Purchasing Bid are now offering discounts to staff, students and families on computers and accessories purchased for PERSONAL USE!
Frequently, I’m asked which computer a person should buy. It always depends on what you want to do. For a whole lot of people, Chromebooks are a really great choice. However, it is important for you to balance your needs, wants and budget.
Why should you care? Security isn’t a “fun” topic. It is important though.
Recently, over 270 million email accounts were compromised. These accounts include Mail.ru, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Essentially, all of the email credentials were stolen.
Why should you care?
Hackers know users cling to favourite passwords, resisting admonitions to change credentials regularly and make them more complex. It’s why attackers reuse old passwords found on one account to try to break into other accounts of the same user.
These credentials can thus be used to access lots of other sites. This can lead to bank fraud, the creation of accounts, and more.
Protection comes in the form of not using the same passwords on multiple sites. So how can you remember thousands of passwords? One easy way is to use a password manager.
By the way, there are a couple of practices which can truly cause problems:
Passwords aren’t fun. Security can be a hassle. However, it is much less fun and a much bigger hassle if your credentials are stolen.
RESA has scheduled maintenance on their network coming up this Sunday.
Potential service outages can last from 8AM to 4PM. School districts are asked to avoid scheduling activities on that date that require Internet connectivity.
Since we rolled out email for students, we are aware that there has been some confusion over the names. We have several instances of students and staff with the same name. In order to help clear up some of the confusion, we are implementing pre-appending Student: to all students.
Currently, this doesn’t seem to show up in the Gmail Compose window, but does show up in Contacts.
It looks like this:
Naturally, you should note the difference in gmail addresses (staff has a very different pattern than students).
Once everything is processed and in sync, users can start email with Student: Student Name (where Student Name is an actual name). This doesn’t help with just typing the name of an adult staff member and seeing a student though (again, please look for the appropriate email address pattern).
Hopefully, this will be one more clue to assist all of our users.
We are working on implementing some other features to assist in identifying staff and students.
*Please note that this is still rolling out and not all students will have the pre-appended Student: yet. We are not sure how long that the sync will take.
Phishing is a very real problem. Phishing is an attempt to get an email user to either install malware (software that can take over your computer), or to gather information that can be used for nefarious reasons. This can include having a user enter information into a form or email that then gives the bad guys that information. This could be signing into a bank account and transferring money (your money) to themselves (no longer your money at that point). It can be to collect user names so that they can install software that will encrypt your computer (then they charge you to decrypt it).
Here is a quick guide that we’ve developed to provided some tips to protect yourself.